I have no doubt a lot of shady business is going on in crypto
The collapse of the obvious Ponzi scheme at Bitconnect yesterday has me thinking about what other scams are going on.
There's no doubt there are dozens, if not hundreds of similar ones. But at this point, I think that's accepted.
But what if there's a really big scam. Yesterday I wrote about a paper from some researchers who showed the 2013 run-up in Bitcoin to $1200 from $150 was all manipulation at Mt Gox.
Something similar now would be tougher because there are a bunch of different exchanges. But if there is something shady going on my guess it has something to do with Bitfinex and Tether. They're tied to the same people and to the Panama Papers.
Now all the mechanics of the accusations are a bit beyond my understanding but a few people on Twitter are convinced that Tether is being printed to support Bitcoin. One is @bitfinexed, who makes some good points.
Now, I've been in markets long enough to know that every conspiracy theorist is probably a loser but also long enough to know that every once in awhile they're right.
So what happened today in Bitcoin? Maybe prices got down to a support level and the money on the sidelines decided to weigh in. Then fear quickly turned back to greed and it was off to the races. Or maybe someone printed 100 million Tether and started buying.
In the crazy crypto mania, anything is possible.
But consider this, the market cap of Tether is now $1.7 billion, which means that someone has $1.7 billion in an account somewhere available for redemption. Or they don't.
And while we're on conspiracy talk, today was the expiration of the first futures contracts.
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